Older blog entries for gman (starting at number 259)

It's 5am, and off in the distance I feel a slight shudder from far distant continents as they rub off each other. thomasvs has been a super cool host - Belgium is a really fun place.

Got into Charleroi on Friday morning, and after meeting up with Mikael, Havoc Owen, Richard and Anders we headed out to Ghent, along the super slow route. It was great seeing those guys again - it's a pity that GUADEC is so far away.

The talks today were pretty cool - Havoc on freedesktop.org and Michael on GNOME 2. It's the first time I've seen Michael talk, all hilarious stuff, but somehow I think there's probably too much packed into the short space. Really nice to see lots of progress making the headlines.

After a Vietnamese restaurant we all retired to another Belgian pub [by way of a small like pokey Jazz club that sold Guinness] to drink the night away.

I think I'm still mostly drunk though ;)

Today Sun released GNOME 2.0 on Solaris here. Pretty happy that is all out of the way for now.

So now I just need to organize GUADEC, leave Ireland for a few years and start a flea circus.

Busy weekend.

Zenity 1.0 was released and almost immediately afterwards, I got sent a spec file and 2 rpm packages from Mihai Lazarescu.

Spent a while having a little release notes party on Friday night and soon got bored. Luckily murrayc, jfleck and hp have taken over and seem to be doing an excellent job.

I got frustrated at the lack of GUADEC happenings to the extent that I wrote a motivational email trying to tell people what they should do. I think it might have worked now. I've seen more emails in the course of 2 days than I saw all of last month.

I went into work on a Sunday. How sad is that? At least I caught up on a *HUGE* chunk of work I'd been slacking on last week.

I was too busy this weekend. I didn't even get a chance to watch the 5 DVD's I bought. Sigh.

A while back I had this glorified idea that I might be able to write a GNOME 2 book, which I think the GNOME project really deserves right now.

After spending an evening trying to write up the release notes for GNOME 2.2, I'm not really sure anymore.

Okay, so Apple might make some pretty nice hardware, but their power adaptors really suck. My iBook one snapped right at the plug revealing 2 really small wires almost like earphone connections. This blows. I ordered one of these gizmos today - hopefully it ships soon. I can't really do without a laptop :(

So the plan of avoiding maintaining gnome-utils didn't last very long when I had to release gnome-utils-2.2.0.1 that fixed a crash in gfloppy, and added some of the wonderful GNOME 2.2 docs from Sun.

Over the past couple of days I've managed to get myself completely tangled up in writing a power management preference dialog. Ordinarily this might be a really straightforward little piece of code, but now I think it's got a little bit out of hand. The fact that I'm trying to figure out CORBA and bonobo stuff, scares the willies out of me. I've already written the factory code, the DPMS stuff, most of the APM stuff and already pushing 3,000 lines of code. I haven't even written the notification icon stuff. I have a strange inkling that I'm just dumb at writing code.

A little while back, I joined about 60 people walking 56km into the Wicklow hills starting at midnight one Friday. It was a wonderful experience, although at times a little boring walking the roads. The weather was perfect, clear skies and a fresh blanket of snow. It was strangely eerie walking with so much light, since the skies had been invaded by a half moon and a few billion stars proving enough light to reflect off the snow. A little short of 12 hours, I had finished. Mostly tired, but well able to walk another 7km to the nearest pub for a pint. The day after, feeling a little stiff and sore, I decided to wander down to the crags in Glendalough. I think my body decided enough was enough. Now my foot is buggered and I limp a lot - I'm not entirely sure if I just pulled a muscle or incurred a stress fracture. I won't climb now for the next month or more.

This makes me sad.

I started writing silly commit messages when I added a few people to gnome-about/contributors.h - I'm not sure if I can really continue this for everyone. Really.

Open source is great. You get people like menthos coming along and doing really kickarse things - today's contribution is joint document about CVS and l10n from a translators point of view. No one could ever possibly have any concept of how important this contribution was. It really makes you wish that there was more menthos' in the world. I reckon every line of this document is worth at least 10 lines of code, if not more. Not enough people say thanks in the Open Source world.

Thank You.

mjs: Um, luck? ;)

So I released gnome-utils-2.2.0, did a bit of spring cleaning and handed in my maintenance apron. It's been a bunch of fun and I've learned heaps and heaps about CVS while I've been doing it. I said a while back that 2.2.0 would be my last - it's time to move on, I have stopped enjoying it.

It's not as if I'm going to disappear now, I'll still hang around on the bug list and maybe think about rewriting gnome-dictionary. I think that was my favourite of the utilities. I spent a few minutes every now and again just looking up new words in the dictionary.

I hope someone interested takes over - it's not hard, just needs a little bit of dedication to begin with.

Okay, so my pet project, zenity [cvs.gnome.org], is coming along nicely and it's almost ready for a 1.0 release. Spent a while today writing up the help documentation for it. The about dialog even has a new icon, which is as zen as you get really. I just wonder if anyone will use this, apart from MikeGTN who seems to be the only one sending me patches so far.

Other than that, life is as normal.

In the quest to become the first cvs.gnome.org module with the letter 'z', I called the gdialog rewrite 'zenity'.

Not more than an hour later hadess created the first cvs.gnome.org module with the letter 'q', a frontend to the ipod called 'qahog'.

Clearly, an important day in the life of GNOME.